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How a Laundromat Scaled to 30 Million by Fixing Machine Reliability
Description
In this episode of Scaling Up with Fexingo, hosts Lucas and Luna explore how a small three-store laundromat chain in Minneapolis reached $30 million in revenue by making a counterintuitive bet: they slowed down their machines. Founder Terry O'Leary discovered that his high-speed, high-maintenance washers were causing $200,000 a year in repair costs and customer churn. By switching to slower, industrial-grade machines with longer warranties, his uptime hit 99.5%, revenue per store doubled, and he expanded to 15 locations. Lucas and Luna break down the unit economics, the decision to ignore industry norms, and the one metric—mean time between failures—that Terry tracked obsessively. If you run a service business with expensive equipment, this episode is a masterclass in reliability as a growth strategy.